If That's What it Takes: Part 4
We stepped off the stone steps and out into the gloom and began the search for the very same young human woman that had just taken shots at all of us. Prime was staring out through the mist trying to catch some sight of her when I noticed something. The foliage that was growing on the ground around the place was rather long at this point and as a consequence of this clearly showed the places where some one had just gone crashing through it.
"There!" I pointed. "That must have been the way she went."
He looked down in that direction for a moment and then the both of us took off doing our best to make it down the hill despite the slick conditions. Halfway down we noticed that what ever had made this trail must have slipped and rolled the rest of the way down, due to the fact that a great deal more of the plants were disturbed. So we continued in that direction and as if to confirm that this was indeed the way the girl had come both of us heard someone moan.
There she was, lying at the bottom of the incline now slightly wet and with a few of the plants sticking to her clothes. The hair that had once according to Optimus been very long and one of her many great beauties had been removed, as Megatron had claimed and now what remained was plastered to her head and face. She didn't seem that she was going to be moving from that spot, in fact she looked like she was pressing her face into her arms doing her level best to quell the flood of emotions the appearance of her "Dead" mate had stirred up in her.
Prime backtracked slightly so that he would not come down right next to her and, then carefully made his way to where she was at the end of the incline. Once again however, she somehow knew he was coming because the moment he was within a two meter radius of her she lifted her face and looked at him once again with a look of utter horror. I watched as she managed to get to her feet and stood there with her weapon aimed at Prime.
"Angel," He held out his hands, "I didn't come here to hurt you. No one sent me to torment you. I'm real, can't you remember?"
"Remember!" She snarled, "I remember everything! I remember that Megatron has no shame, and that Glavatron is no better!"
She snapped the arm that was holding the firearm down and proceeded to spin away from Optimus and take off running. Now I made it down to where He was standing and I could see that this had actually once been a road or a path of some kind. It was little more than a pair of indentations with a small bit of gravel in them now. The girl however believed that it would lead her somewhere that she could hide from her Visions.
"Does this lead some where?" I asked.
He nodded to me, "It leads to the barn that she has on the property. She had let all of us set up a remote command center there."
"And so she runs there thinking that there will be something there to protect her or a way to contact the others that still "live"?"
"Yes." He shook his head, "I think she's going to be in for an even bigger shock than she was before."
"How so," I had to ask.
"If the communications test we did was correct, there's nothing left of the remote center." He started following in the direction she had gone, "Which means that there's probably nothing left of the barn itself."
As if to confirm our suspicions we heard a loud wail that could only have come from the wayward girl, and so we set off in the direction that she had gone. Once again we found her, this time she was on her knees with her face pressed into both hands and once again was over come by what ever it was she was feeling. The barn that had housed the command center was just as Prime predicted. Nothing more than a pile of rubble that was still smoking slightly as if it had recently just finished burning, or as if it had been a last minute thought on someone's part to destroy the thing. It had assured that there was no way of her contacting anyone else in, effectively stranding this woman in the middle of nowhere until she had come to terms with her visions or someone had come to rescue her.
Once again Prime tried to approach her and somehow she still knew that he was coming.
"Please," she begged from behind her hands, "Please just go away!"
"Angel I can't!" he told her, "I refuse to leave you, for anything!"
She raised her wet face and looked at him eyes full of accusation, "You were willing to leave me here and go back and fight! You were willing to stick me in that stupid city and assume I'd be safe!" She shuddered and sucked in a rather ragged breath and kept going, "And you were willing to DIE to keep Megatron from hurting anyone else."
"I would NEVER leave you alone," Prime pleaded, "I know you'd hand me my skid-plate in a sack if I did that!"
Now I was beginning to get some inkling of what the programming had done to Prime's human mate. It had basically brought all of her greatest fears to life. Abandonment by the man she loved, his death, everything she had dreaded happening in her life had been made real to her.
"And worst of all," Angel flung at him again, "You were willing to die to so that kid could take your place!"
"What kid? NO one is going to take my place Angel," he tried to assure her, "We don't even know who the next Prime is."
"DON'T LIE TO ME!" She screamed, "I don't blame Rodimus for what happened. But why, why did that monster have to use a child for a shield, an innocent CHILD!"
"Rodimus?" Prime looked at her in shock now. That name stirring up of his old memories.
Then yet again the human woman, who had just dropped a bomb of her own, vanished into the gloom of the rain and left the two of us staring after her. He suddenly managed to regain his composure and turned to me.
"Go back to the house Alpha." He ordered.
"Prime…Optimus, I don't think it's a good idea for you to be out here alone." I countered. "What if she starts firing on you again?"
"Then she'll just have to." He shot back. "I don't expect you to understand this Alpha Trion, but I have to do this on my own."
I lowered my optics for a moment and then looked back at him, "As you wish Optimus. I still do not think this is a wise decision though."
"Its not about wisdom Alpha," He corrected me with a greater amount of conviction than I had seen in him in a long time, "Its about love, and we both know that love never really makes sense."
"That's very true." I had to agree. "Very well then, I believe now that you have to do this on your own, therefore I will be of better use back at the house."
"Thank you."
I watched him stalk off into the rain, this time I could see that he knew talking would never do any good. Trying to reason his way through the images that had been forced into this mates mind would never work. Now he was on the hunt and wouldn't return until he had done what he had come to this place to do to begin with. As much as I thought it was a bad idea I headed back to the house and proceeded to check on those that had been left there in the aftermath of the first meeting. Jazz was in the process of helping Ratchet look after Ironhide in the dining hall of the house. Prowl however was no where to be found in this part of the house. So I walked deeper into the thing and finally found him in the room where we had located the girl when we had first arrived. He was knelt down on the floor in the process of collecting some things that must have been scattered there by her.
He looked up at me as I walked in, "these belong to Miss Angel, and I want them to be okay for her when she's …alright."
I nodded and proceeded to get down and help him start collecting them. That was when we noticed something else on the floor. I had no description for what the substance could be but it looked like it had been dropped there after the cards had been scattered. Prowl stared at the strange red brown splotch and appeared to become more and more distressed as he looked at it.
"Prowl," I questioned, "What is that?"
"Its blood," He touched the spot with his hand, "the human equivalent of mech fluid, processed energon."
"I see," I stared hard at it. "Was the young lady hurt in the fight?"
Prowl shook his head at me, "No, this looks like it has been here for a while, it's dried."
He got up and proceeded to look around to see if there were any more of the strange stains any where around the house. It took more than a few moments of searching but he did find one more small stain. It turned out to be in the human woman's fresher station. On the floor next to the water tank, just there where it could possibly have little or great meaning.
"Something's just not right here." Prowl told me. "I don't know much about human forensics but this just seems off."
"Perhaps the girl was hurt somehow in being transferred here?" I said, trying to provide some answer.
"I hope that's all it was," He shook his head; "It just doesn't fit somehow."
"The answers will be forthcoming when Miss Angel recovers hopefully." I offered
Prowl opened his mouth to say more, that was when all of us there in that house heard a cry that put all of the others we had heard so far to complete and utter shame. I was guessing it was at that instant that Prime must have located his human mate and done what had to be done to save the woman.
I was correct in this assumption. While I had gone back to the house and had been making the rather ominous discovery with Prowl, Prime had followed the girl into the woods and tracked her until he saw her strength finally give out again and she collapsed on the ground in a small clearing on her land. During the chase several times the girl had stopped and fired at him. Whoever had altered the young woman's mind had done so in a way that she would fight no matter how close it came to killing her. Indeed by the time the last of the rounds were expended the girl had nearly run her self into oblivion. Now all she could do was sit there and try to get some of her wind back.
Prime was standing a good 20 meters from her just watching. He had noticed that this path, the one that had led her to this clearing had been used at lot and this must have been one of her favorite places on the farm. The fact that she had never gotten to show him this place pierced his heart to the very core. Now whenever she came to her clearing or tried to show it to him, his memory would be tainted by this horrid instance and he would never be able to love it the way she would want him to. So for the moment he just stood there watching her.
He stood there and watched her until he came to the moment where he had to make the choice. She looked down at the gun in her hand and proceeded to eject the clip and found it empty. She slid the clip back into the gun and cast it away from her as if she were flinging a viper from her grasp.
"Please God, someone …" She begged, "Just let me have some peace."
Optimus closed his optics for a moment and clicked the safety off his own weapon. He raised it and drew it up on her, the motion catching her attention as he did so. She stared at him for a moment, and in that second in her eyes she was begging him to do it. She could live without him, she could find away to go on. However, if she were forced to face his image and had to confront him again and again, knowing that she could never ever have him back, that she was seeing him but was forever alone, that would destroy her.
"Forgive me," He told her.
A moment later it was done and the girl was lying in the clearing at his feet, the monstrosity that was controlling her mind finally, finally shut down. A look of peace on her face so deep that once again it slashed Prime's emotions open and left him as raw and wounded as the girl herself had been.
The ion rifle that had done its work dropped to the ground from his suddenly nerveless fingers and he dropped down on to his own knees next to the girl and tried to get his own feelings under control. He sat there for a moment so consumed by anger at what he had done, and for the one that had made him commit this act that he literally began to shake.
He suddenly threw his head back in the rain and cried out at the top of his vocal circuits.
"MEGATRON!"
All of us heard this; this was the cry that had put all the others that had been uttered during our time on the farm. The one that had rendered Prowl silent in his speculations about the blood marks, and the one that left all of the rest of us wondering just what was going to become of the leader of the Autobots as well as his human mate.
There were those of us, after we heard, that expected to never see either Optimus or Angel come out of the woods again. So I am forced to admit there was a great deal of relief I felt when I saw him appear on the tree line and begin the walk back to the house were all of us were waiting. I was unsure from where we were standing, but it seemed to me that he was in fact carrying something in his arms. All of us, even Ironhide stood and stared as he finally made it to the house and it was revealed that the thing he was holding was indeed the girl.
"Oh Primus," Ironhide managed when he finally got a good look at them.
"Are we ready to pull out?" Prime asked.
Every single one of us nodded and we all began to make the preparations to move out and get back to the Ark as fast as humanly possible. The information to remove the implant was there in Ratchet's lab waiting for all of us and all we had to do now was to get the woman back to where we could help her.
While the others checked the last bit of preparations, I moved over to where Prime was standing with the woman in his arms.
"You did the right thing," I told him.
"Did I?" He shot back. "She was begging me to kill her Alpha, maybe coming here was a mistake."
"You don't really believe that and you know it," I shook my head, "This was done to make you and her both doubt the validity of your love for each other, to bring both her and your worst fears to life."
"It worked."
"Indeed," I nodded, "So now you have to prove that you're strong enough to prevail. I for one believe that you and her both are."
He stopped looking off into the distance and looked at me, "Thank you for having faith in me."
"In both of you Prime," I nodded to the woman in his arms, "I have met the young woman, I know she loves you, and I know you will endure."
I went to finish helping the others, I was hoping that this would be the end of all of this and it would be over once the woman was safe. I did not, could not know that this was just the beginning.